le
returning to his home; one delighted wife; suitable number of ebullient
children and, inevitably, a dog. The dog varies. In England they
generally put in a terrier, in war time a bulldog; in Germany it may be
a dachshund; and in other countries it is another kind of dog, but it is
always the same idea.

And so it is not wonderful that the home has looked censoriously upon
everything that took people away from its orbit. Likewise it is not
wonderful that people have fled to anything available so as to escape
the charmed circle. The week-end is in general a very over-rated
amusement, for it consists mainly in packing and preparing to catch a
train, then thinking of packing and catching a train, then packing and
catching a train; but still the week-end amounts to a desertion, and
hardly a month passes without a divine laying of savage hands upon the
excursion. There was a time when holidays themselves were looked upon as
audacious breaches of the conventions. In the early nineteenth century
nobody went to Brighton except the Regent and the smart set; even in the
Thackerayan period people did not think it necessary to leave London in
August, and when they took the Grand Tour they were bent on improving
their minds. The Kickleburys could not go up the Rhine without a
powerful feeling of self-consciousness; I think they felt that they were
outraging the Victorian virtues, so they had to make up for it by taking
a guide, who for four or five weeks lectured them day and night upon the
ruins of Godesberg. All this was opposed to the spirit of the home, just
as anything which is outside the home is opposed to the spirit of the
home, as was, for instance, every dance that has ever been known. In the
_Observer_, in 1820, appeared a poem expressing horror and disgust of
the waltz, and, curiously enough, very much in the same terms as the
diatribes in the American papers of 1914 against the turkey trot and
the bunny hug. When the polka came in, in the middle of the nineteenth
century, good people clustered to see it danced, just like the more
recent tango, and it was considered very fast. All this may appear
somewhat irrelevant, but my case is mainly that the old attitude, now
decaying, is that anything that happened outside the home, whether sport
or amusement, was anything between faintly and violently evil. The old
ideal of home was concentrated in Sunday: a long night; heavy breakfast;
church; walk in the park; heavy dinner, i